What is a Brand Personality?
What is a Brand Personality?
In a lot of ways, branding is the act of creating expectations for how you will interact with your customers. There's the expectation that you’ll be relieved when you call Zappos customer service or hysterically laughing at any interaction with Cards Against Humanity. The point is that every brand has a personality, and it dictates what we expect from them.
The brand personality can help bring your brand into clearer focus. It provides you with clues to what are the feelings you want to give customers when they interact with you through your marketing, customer service, and even your products.
What’s my brand’s personality?
To understand your brand’s personality, think of your brand as if it were a human being. Create a comprehensive list of personality traits by detailing as many characteristics of that person as you can.
To understand your brand’s personality, think of your brand as a human being. Create a comprehensive list of personality traits beginning with how old your brand is. Is it 10, 20, 40, or 65 years old? Is your brand a man or a woman? Is it friendly or slightly more aggressive? Is it blunt? Does it like to shock people?
The Different Personalities of Airlines.
Let’s take a look at Virgin America. Most domestic airlines have really dry, authoritarian personalities. Aside from being an outlaw brand, the Virgin brand personality is distinctly different from other airlines. It’s upbeat. It’s funny. It’s uplifting. It’s irreverent. It doesn’t feel oppressive and rigid like the other airlines.
Whereas, when people fly Delta, they feel the brand’s seriousness. It's another brand that offers the exact same product as what Virgin America provides. Yet Delta's personality feels completely different from Virgin's. Delta is buttoned up, all the way down to the uniforms flight attendants wear.
Brand personality is so important for defining the way people experience a brand. The brand personality informs everything from the way the brand looks and the way it sounds to the voice and music it uses in its commercials to the actual words it always says and the words it would never say.
Brand personality is another way to ensure your brand carries the right tone and character to deliver on your brand promise to your customer. If you need help figuring out your brand's personality, we're here to help. Reach out to one of our experts below.